Madeline Earp

Madeline Earp is senior researcher for CPJ’s Asia Program. She has studied Mandarin in China and Taiwan, and graduated with a master’s in East Asian studies from Harvard. Follow her on Twitter @cpjasia and Facebook @ CPJ Asia Desk.

2012

Shi
Junrong, Xi'an Evening News bureau chief in the city of Wei'an, ran into
trouble recently after he reported on the costly brand of luxury cigarettes
favored by local officials. He announced on his microblog that the paper
suspended him soon after, according to the U.S. government-funded Radio
Free Asia.

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Well, that didn't take long. Just days after The New York Times' soft launch of its
Chinese-language edition and accompanying microblog accounts, Berkeley-based China Digital Times website reports
that the @nytchinese Sina Weibo feed is no longer accessible in China,
along with two accounts hosted by Netease
and Sohu. We couldn't pull them up this
morning from New York, either.

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CPJ is monitoring with concern the news coverage of Baker Abdulla
Atyani, a Pakistan-based Jordanian Al-Arabiya TV journalist, and his two
Philippine crew members, Rolando Letrero and Ramelito Vela, who have been
unaccounted for since June 12.

Atyani, Letrero, and Vela left their hotel in Jolo, in the
southern Philippines, to interview a commander for the militant Abu Sayyaf, a
banned Islamic separatist group in the region, according to local and
international news reports. The three refused offers of a security detail from
local authorities, the reports said.

They have not returned. Various news accounts report them as "missing," "kidnapped," and a link between Abu Sayyaf and Al-Qaeda.

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"Bangladeshi democracy [may be] doomed to more of the same,"
International
Crisis Group wrote in a recent commentary. They are describing a
longstanding pattern of antagonism between Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's Awami
League and the opposition Bangladesh National Party (BNP), which the Crisis
Group describes as "a pernicious cycle of zero-sum politics." If the political
situation descends into unrest, journalists covering it will suffer.

China's state news agency Xinhua published the full
text of the state council's National Human Rights Action Plan 2012-15 on
Monday. There is no section dedicated to press freedom. But the most striking
omissions can be found in the text itself.

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The
New Delhi-based Tehelka magazine
published an open
letter by imprisoned freelance journalist Lingaram
Kodopi on Monday. Kodopi, one of the two journalists CPJ documented in prison in India on
December 1, 2011, has been held without charge since September 2011 as a
suspected associate of insurgent Maoists in Chhattisgarh. His supporters
believe he faces harassment for documenting police violence in the region.

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The
annual crackdown
on commemorations of the June 4 anniversary of the brutal suppression of
student-led demonstrations based in Tiananmen Square in 1989 Beijing is under way,
according to Agence
France-Presse. What's concerning is the number of writers and activists for
whom "crackdown" is the new normal.

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Sina's Twitter-like microblog service Weibo has released new
guidelines to restrict users who share banned content, according to
international news reports. It's the first time such guidelines target users
who adopt puns, homonyms, and other veiled
references to discuss censored news stories without using keywords on the
propaganda department's blacklist, the reports said.